Page 11 of False Start

But the snack plate was amazing. I had to give Trent that. Even if he probably paid some bougie lunch spot way too much money for it, it was nice. Whole nuts, tiny sandwiches, a variety of cheeses cut into tiny cubes and meats shaped into flowers, each item painstakingly labeled with tiny chalkboard signs. My plate overflowed and when a green olive rolled onto the coffee table, I gave up on the pretense of sitting anywhere but directly beside the food and parked myself on the floor.

“Where’d you get this?” I asked, offering a small olive branch of conversation.

“Ruffage. It’s on Lincoln. Have you been?” Trent reached over the coffee table for a handful of Jordan almonds.

“No. I don’t hang out in that part of town.”

The bougie part of town. I hadn’t said it, but the pointed look by Derek told me I implied as much. “Other than the bar by the kickball field, Kit doesn’t leave the neighborhood.”

I certainly didn’t wander around the “historic” downtown district. The part of town where the old warehouses had been gutted and replaced with cobblestone roads and flickering streetlights. A nod to a colonial period that I doubted really existed anywhere except a greedy developer’s sense of nostalgia.

“With the hospital right down the street, I don’t really needto go anywhere else,” I said, chewing a slice of prosciutto.

Also, I didn’t get paid enough to afford the twenty-dollar cocktails and high-end shopping on Lincoln Street.

“She also can’t go anywhere else,” Derek sighed, eyes wandering to Trent. “Her car is a piece of a shit.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but Derek had a point. My previous car had been fine. Old, sure, but reliable. A 2000 Honda Accord that had its fair share of chipped paint and a dingy interior, but it could transport me across the state if necessary. Then, my mom had moved, and I’d taken my dad’s Mercury Cougar rather than watch it be sold.

Derek had offered to park on the street. Our lease only provided two parking spots. Norwalk wasn’t so cosmopolitan that street parking was impossible, but Derek had a brand-new Mazda, so I street parked the Honda for the better part of a year before finally admitting I didn’t need two cars, particularly one that wouldn’t start half the time.

“My car is an antique.” I defended it even as, internally, I acknowledged the sensible thing to do would have been to sell my dad’s car. Sure, it was in rough shape, but probably worth something.

My decision to keep the ancient, barely-driven Cougar led me to walking to work most days. Good for my health, not great for my ego. What self-respecting, supposedly gainfully employed twenty-four-year-old didn’t own a reliable car?

“Really? What kind of car is it?” Trent asked.

My cheeks burned, and I dipped my head, mumbling into my plate. “A Mercury Cougar.”

Trent’s blond eyebrows drew together. He tilted his head. “A Mercury? Do they even make those anymore?”

I didn’t know the answer to that. I shrugged. “Obviously, it’s not an Aston Martin or a Bugatti. I wouldn’t expect you to know anything about it.”

He swiped a piece of brie off the table. “Nope. I’m not really a car guy. I mean, I like fast cars, but old stuff? Not my thing.”

His tone stayed easy, which surprised me. Sure, I didn’t know shit about Trent, but I knew guys like him. Guys who’d rather die than admit to not knowing everything about everything. Guys who had never changed a car’s oil but talked about cars as if they were a seasoned mechanic.

Maybe the ludicrous amount of money Trent made from football inoculated him from that tendency.

“It wasn’t Kit’s either, but she’s determined to race the car. She’s been working on it for months.” Derek gave us an encouraging smile.

He had it bad for Trent. Not romantically. Even if I hadn’t read all the gossip columns about him, Trent gave off straight dude energy like no one else I’d ever met. But Derek loved a bromance, and Trent was his type. By the end of the night, they’d be drunk, discussing offensive formations and the best IPAs in the Southeast.

I needed to escape.

After I ate.

“You race?” Trent stood up. “Hold that thought. I’m gonna grab us a beer.”

He returned with two beers. Not the cheap stuff we kept in the back of the fridge, reserved for late nights working on the car when we needed just a kick of booze to wipe out the memory of completely screwing up an exhaust system or draining the wrong line. His beer was a sunshine-y yellow hazy liquid, poured into a glass with a head that looked like it came straight out of a tap.

I grabbed the offered glass and took a sip. Not even a little watery. “This is good.”

“Tell me about racing.”

“There’s really not much to tell. I’m notracing,like NASCAR and F1.” I glanced over at Derek whose rapt attention remainedon the game. My mind picked through all the parts of the story that led to me signing up for the rally and how much I wanted to share with Trent. Sure, he was being nice, but he wasn’tmyfriend. “It’s a rally. The car isn’t fast, and I don’t really know how to make it fast. It was something my dad wanted to do, before…”

Even three years later, I struggled with saying the words aloud.

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